A Dance With Dragons: Prologue (Chapter Summary)

The prologue is narrated from the point of view of Varamyr Sixskins.  He is sitting in a one-room hut of mud and straw with a thatched roof and a smoke hole, and a floor of hard-packed earth.  Elsewhere his spirit inhabits and the controls the wolf Stalker, who is hunting with his pack-mates, fellow wolves, One Eye and Sly.  One Eye is the oldest, the biggest, and the fiercest of the three, Stalker is lean, quick, and young, and Sly, the sole female, cunning.  The wolves attack and devour four humans armed with spears: two men, and a woman carrying a baby.  Varamyr returns to his own body still tasting the child’s flesh in his mouth.  The fire in the center of the hut has gone out and Varamyr is unable to relight it.  He calls out for a woman named Thistle who he believes has been absent for days, though he is uncertain.      

After the battle at Castle Black between the wildings and the Night’s Watch, and later Stannis Baratheon’s forces, the wildings scatter: Thenns, giants, Hornfoot men, cave-dwellers with filed teeth, men of the western shore who ride bone chariots.  Harma is dead, Tormund and the Weeper unaccounted for, and Mance Rayder believed captured or killed.  Thousands flee through the forest.  A rider on a gaunt white horse tries to rally the wildings to the Milkwater, claiming that the Weeper is gathering warriors to cross the Bridge of Skulls and take the Shadow Tower; a dour warrior in fur and amber encourages people to head north and take refuge in the valley of the Thenns; Mother Mole, a woods witch, has a vision of a fleet of ships coming to carry the free folk south and leads hundreds east.  

Varamyr had rode into the battle on the back of a snow bear thirteen feet tall, alongside three wolves and a shadowcat he holds in thrall.  He used an eagle to survey the battlefield.  The eagle is engulfed in flames, presumably as the result of Melisandre’s sorcery.  Varamyr goes half-mad with pain and terror and loses control over his animals: the shadowcat races into the woods and the snow bear turns on the wildings before it is slain by a spear.  As Varamyr flees the battle he contemplates inhabiting one of the twins, the big man with the scarred face, or the youth with the red hair (all unnamed), but forbears because the risk of being discovered is too great.  In retreat, Varamyr is forced to leave behind all of his possessions, leading him to steal a squirrel skin cloak off of a dead woman’s body whose head has been crushed.  The woman, as recounted by Thistle, has been killed by a Hornfoot man.  Shortly after Varamyr removes the cloak from the woman’s body a boy appears and drives a long bone knife into his side and takes the cloak.  The boy is the dead woman’s son.  Thistle finds Varamyr’s body and stitches his wound.  She is warty, windburnt, and wrinkled; her chin is pointed, her is nose flat, and a single mole on one of her cheeks has four dark hairs growing from it.  Varamyr lies and tells Thistle his name is Haggon.  She leaves Varamyr in the one-room hut and tells him she will return with food.  

Unable to relight the fire Varamyr opens the door to the hut.  He discovers that the hut is covered in a layer of snow and pushes through.  Outside it is night.  He sees other huts buried in snow and a weirwood covered in ice.  He calls for Thistle but receives no reply.  A wave of dizziness overcomes him and he falls to his knees; starving, he scoops snow into his mouth.  Later he reaches the weirwood tree and uses a fallen branch as a crutch.  He staggers toward the nearest hut, hoping to find food, but the crutch snaps and he collapses into the snow, losing consciousness.  

Varamyr recalls his youth.  He is born a month before his due date and no expects him to live.  Until the age of ten he is called Lump, a name his sister Meha gives him when he was still inside the womb.  Bump, Varamyr’s younger brother by four years, is killed when he is two, three days before his birthday – mauled to death by the family’s three dogs, Loptail, Sniff, and the Growler.  It is suggested that Varamyr was controlling one or more the dogs when the death occurred.  Varamyr’s father executes the three dogs; desperate, Varamyr inhabits Loptail and attempts to flee, but is struck and killed by his father’s axe.  In pain, Varamyr cries out at the same moment the dog is killed, revealing his skin changing ability to his family.  Two days later, Varamyr’s father drags Varamyr into the forest kicking and shrieking and delivers him to Haggon, another skin changer.  

Haggon becomes Varamyr’s guardian and trainer.  Haggon trades with the Night’s Watch at Eastwatch and is known as a friend of the Watch who brings news of life beyond the wall.  He teaches Varamyr how to hunt and fish, to butcher a carcass, to bone a fish, to find his way through the woods, as well as the way of the warg and the secrets of the skin changer.  Dogs are the easiest to bond with.  Wolves are more difficult and make an impression on you for life.  Haggon advises against bonding with any other beasts: cats are vain and cruel, elk are prey, and birds leave men obsessed with flight.  Men who eat the flesh of men, who mate as wolf with wolf, or seize the body of another man are abominations.  Haggon teaches Varamyr that following their true death skin changers have a second life, simpler and sweeter.  In the second life, the skin changer’s memory slowly fades until nothing of the man is left and only the beast remains.  When Varamyr is ten, Haggon takes him to a gathering of skin changers: Borroq with his boar, Orell his eagle, Grisella her goat, and Briar and his shadowcat.  Years later, Orell is killed by Jon Snow and Varamyr takes domain over the eagle.  Varamyr notes that Jon Snow is a strong skin changer, but untrained in and unaware of his true abilities. 

Varamyr eventually kills Haggon; he devours his heart while inhabiting the body of a wolf.  Haggon begins his second life within his wolf Greyskin, but Varamyr takes domain over the beast and releases Haggon’s spirit.  For years, Varamyr lives as a lord secluded within Haggon’s hall: a dozen villages pay him homage; he stalks women with his shadowcat, beds them, takes a hank of their hair, and releases them; he slays village heroes who oppose him.  He returns to his parents to tell them he has become a lord, but finds them dead and burnt.  Years later Mance Rayder recruits Varamyr to his cause. 

Lying in the snow, Varamyr is shaken awake by Thistle.  She warns of hundreds of approaching wights.  As Thistle attempts to raise Varamyr, Varamyr leaps out of his own skin and forces himself into hers.  Varamyr is unable to overwhelm Thistle’s will; she fights back, biting off her tongue and clawing at her own face.  Varamyr’s spirit departs Thistle’s body and seemingly inhabits the weirwood.  Next, he becomes the world itself: he becomes a sparrow, a squirrel, an oak, a horned owl, a hare, earthworms beneath the earth.  He watches a hundred ravens take to the air; a great elk trumpeting, unsettling the children clinging to its back; a sleeping direwolf raising its head and snarling.  His second life begins within One Eye.  He prowls and stands atop a cliff with his pack, Stalker and Sly, overlooking the village where he left his body.  The village is overrun with wights.  One of the wights is Thistle; she stares directly at One Eye.